


There Will Be Time

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Legends, myths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 19:57:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17029020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Something, anything to do with the fact that North and Bunny could easily be as old as Pitch himself is, considering that Easter and Christmas are modeled after 2000+ year old holidays (Spring Equinox and Winter Solstice). Maybe the other guardians are talking and they get to discussing old, old times? Maybe they’ve both gone through long periods where no one believed so they know where Jack is coming from?Maybe they both know just how old Pitch is (not as old as him, but close) and reminisce on how easy it could have been for them to lose their Wonder or Hope."The prompt seemed to want musings about just North and Bunnymund, so that’s what I did. Both Guardians think separately about their pasts and futures–and Pitch.





	There Will Be Time

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr 5/17/2013.

North remembers himself before he was himself. He remembers battles, he remembers a gray cloak and a broad-brimmed hat. He remembers smiling grimly in a sea of blood. He remembers wandering in disguise, an old-man-who-is-not. He remembers leading a mighty hunt for the souls of the wicked. He remembers nine days and nights dying on an ash tree for wisdom. He remembers giving one of his eyes for a drink of water. He remembers ravens.

These memories are not like the ones Tooth preserves in her palace. They have no hard edges, no solid places at which to grasp. They are like the writing on palimpsestic parchment, scraped and repainted and re-inked, and Nicholas St. North as he knows himself is only the most recent illumination.

He was not always Wonder. Nicholas St. North was always Wonder.

One would need the patience of a saint to figure it all out. Fortunately, he was a saint, once. Patron of thieves, who had his bones stolen.

And the myrrh that seeps from his incomplete tomb is the same as the water he gave his eye for and it tastes like Coca-Cola.

Yet there is one constant in all of his memories-not-memories (better to call them habits of thought, sandstone hand labyrinths traced time and time again until only smooth and silent pebbles remain). Pitch. He was not always called that, of course. But he is always the same.

Can he not change? North wonders. Is that his reward for living so long? He wonders when he will have lived long enough to not change. Will he be Wonder, then? What will he do when the world changes and he does not? He knows all too well what Pitch did.

***

He or she, she or he, dawn and the lying-not-lying Bede. Fingers or paws, moon or sun, watch them both, watch them all, year after year. He learns to die. He learns to not die. A talent known by trees and grass. Every year the snowdrops are the same. The hoped-for blooms are neither woman nor man nor rabbit, but they are part of him all the same.

He is certain he will never feel old. He is certain he can only ever be one year old. One plus one plus one plus one plus one plus on and on. With a pause for breath, a pause for death. Paws. He can remember enough to know that he did not always have them, but this year he did, and so he always did. Hope is the thing with fur. Every year the snowdrops are the same.

He wonders what it would be like to feel old, and he thinks of the one and one and one that will carry him to the age of the oldest being he knows. Pitch Black. The man-or-maybe-not-a-man lives in millennia like towering skyscrapers while Bunny tears his house down every year. From that height of time who would not always be falling?

And he hopes, he hopes he will never have to find out first hand.


End file.
